Motorola is trying to recover from a disappointing Cyber Monday, during which its Moto Maker website for the Moto X went down and never recovered. As a result, the company’s big Moto X promotion was postponed to another day. The downtime was a big enough snafu that Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside penned a letter to explain what happened.
According to Woodside, Motorola’s servers were not prepared for the large volume of concurrent orders that hit the site on Cyber Monday morning. The Moto Maker website went down and ordering was inconsistent. After hours of silence, the company decided to turn off the promotion while it regrouped. Woodside writes, The company announced that it will offer its promotion again starting on Wednesday, December 4th at 12PM EST. A second promotional day is slated for Monday, December 9th. The number of available phones will be doubled and accessories will be 30% off on those days. Don’t get excited if you go to the Moto Maker site tomorrow as it will be open for regular-priced purchases, not the promotion. Do you plan on buying a Moto X on Wednesday? Or was the Cyber Monday event enough of a letdown that you changed your mind? Second, our pre-sale site testing was not sufficiently extensive. Testing failed to reveal weaknesses caused by large volumes of concurrent orders flowing through the MotoMaker customization engine. Thus, when we opened the promotion this morning, an extraordinary spike in concurrent orders caused our website to go down. We couldn’t fulfill orders. The site became unstable. While some orders were filled, many customers tried all day to place their orders, unsuccessfully. Customers were left frustrated.
